If you REALLY want to be an OUTSTANDING speaker, then...

"Forget Everything 'They' Have Taught You And Listen Up..."

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Everybody can talk, but very few people can influence.

Many people can stand up in front of a group, yet very few can move that group into action. If you work for an organization, you know that the higher up you go, the more important your presentation skills become.

As legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said " As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word."

If you are an entrepreneur or a small business owner you have no choice. You can be the ultimate expert in your field, but if you don't communicate that expertise properly, you are not going to be successful.

My first EVER paid client was a professional speaker who was already speaking professionally for 5 years. At that time, I did not understand why he wanted to hire me as a speaking coach because he was already very successful, but later on I understood why. He wanted some help with conversion, to sell his coaching programs and products during his presentations even better.

That gentleman understood that even an incremental improvement would translate into tens of thousands (if not millions) of dollars during his speaking career.

During the last 11 years I have helped professionals from all different walks of life to improve their presentation effectiveness. I have coached and develop presentations for an array of professionals like lawyers, financial planners, mortgage professionals, realtors, coaches, speakers, CEOs, executives, NFL players, moms, MLM (multi-level professionals), commercial real estate brokers, hard-money lenders, business brokers, dentists, chiropractors, insurance professionals, real estate investors, New York Best Selling authors and business owners.

Which One Are You?

After thousands of hours doing one-on-one presentation coaching, I realized that professionals who want to improve their presentation effectiveness fall into 1 of these 5 categories:

The Novice: This client has no experience doing public speaking. She logically understands the importance of speaking in front of groups of people, but emotionally she does not feel certain. She may experience a little FUNDA (fear, uncertainty, nervousness, doubt and anxiety) just with the thought of being in front of people. She is either starting out in business, or she has a job that did not require any type of group communication before. However, she is excited about becoming more effective presenting her ideas with more influence and confidence. She is looking to break through her FUNDA and effectively speak with confidence in front of an audience.

The Sales Professional: He usually works for a company and wants to improve his game. He noticed there is a huge opportunity within his company and industry for him to communicate his message powerfully. This opportunity exists because most of this colleagues and competitors are not doing a good job of communicating their messages. Usually this professional already has a presentation that his company gave to him, but for the most part it is standard, boring, and not that effective.  This professional is committed to take his current sales, presentation and influence skills to the next level. He believes that if becomes the spokesperson and advocate for this company now, he will gain massive exposure, become more effective when doing sales presentations, and increase his personal income along the way. In spite of having traditional sales training before, this professional is looking to get advance training in presentation and influence strategies.

The Entrepreneur : This client either run his own business or is someone who has a very strong entrepreneurial mindset. He wants to improve his communication skills because he has to inspire his team and acquire new clients at the same time. He is interested in becoming a flexible and persuasive communicator so he can capitalize in every single presentation opportunity he has: presenting effectively at the chamber of commerce, mastermind groups, webinars, sales meetings, videos, and public seminars. He understand the power of truly being recognized as an "authority or expert" in his industry and he wants to prepare for it.  The entrepreneur is looking to become a flexible communicator, so the can brand himself in different mediums.

The Executive: This client has a strong corporate background and she retains a leadership position, as the CEO or as an executive of her organization. She spends a majority of her time in meetings, presenting her ideas to one person or a group of people. She has to become a master of "idea selling", and she knows that every meeting counts. She presents to variety of audiences as well: employees, shareholders, stakeholders, clients, prospective clients, media professionals, fundraisers, etc.  Because she spends most of her time attempting to influence her audiences, she has this drive to learn new presentation ideas and strategies.

The Professional Speaker: This client, as the name implies, is already a professional communicator. For the most part, he has been speaking for many years and he has experience presenting to small, medium and large audiences. He studied presentation skills and may have attended public speaking and presentation training before. He feels very comfortable in front of groups of people, and he decided to become a professional speaker because he loves speaking, helping people and the financial rewards. He is looking to get better at selling his products and coaching when presenting his message.

So which one relates most to your current situation?

Are you The Novice, The Sales Professional, The Entrepreneur, The Executive or The Professional Speaker? Are you a mixed between the two of them? And most important, who would you like to be 12 months from now?

The 5 Barriers To Presentation Success

Besides understanding the profile and experience levels of our clients, our intensive presentation coaching background allowed us to determine, with specificity, the problems and challenges these clients experience. This understanding helped us develop a robust coaching program that helps our clients to eliminate these major presentation roadblocks. Every single challenge that our clients experience will fall into one of these 5 pillars:

Presentation Psychology: By far, this is the biggest challenge that inexperienced presenters face. I call it FUNDA (fear, uncertainty, nervousness, doubt and anxiety). This challenge is not new, but it is relevant and wide-spread in our society. This FUNDA prevents people from all walks of life from communicating effectively, in front of 1 person, 100 people or an audience of 1,000. For a lot of professionals, just the thought of being in front of a group or in front of a camera causes them to have anxiety, shortness of breath, tingling sensations, cotton mouth and much more. It is my prediction that the FUNDA of presenting will grow in the future years, as social media becomes more wide spread. Think about it! People now can hide behind the computer and communicate their messages without taking the risk of being rejected in front of a live audience. If you want to be an effective communicator, you must have the tools necessary to overcome the FUNDA and communicate your message with confidence.

Presentation Delivery: You go to your favorite restaurant and order your favorite dish, but to your surprise it takes too long. When it finally arrives, it is cold! How do feel? Presentation is like that. You can have the best content (food), but if the delivery is off, the message (the dish) suffers. I have seen very successful CEOs delivering critical messages poorly. We all have seen this before: monotone, low energy, filler words, no eye contact, no interaction, poor body language, hundreds of words in a slide, etc.  The biggest problem with Presentation Delivery is that most presenters are not aware of how bad they are, and how much better they could become with the right coaching. They think that just because they know how to talk, they know how to present, and that is a huge problem.

Presentation Structure: I want you to remember the last group presentation you gave. How long did you take to create your message? Did you spend a lot of time brainstorming and organizing your ideas? Did you spend so much time creating your presentation that you did not have the time to rehearse it? Were you indecisive about what you should include in your presentation and what you should leave out? Most professionals adopt three damaging behaviors when developing a presentation:

  1. they procrastinate until right before the presentation and then they go into panic mode
  2. they spend a lot of time thinking about, brainstorming, creating the slides, but NOT enough time rehearsing the presentation
  3. They tried to included everything they know about a specific subject and their presentation becomes this huge "data dump" instead of a persuasiveargument. In the end of it, their performance suffers because both the messenger and the message are not compelling enough.

Increments of Influence: You were excited about your presentation, you were prepared, you worked on your delivery skills, and you spoke powerfully. You thought you nailed it... The audience came to you and said: "you are the best presenter I have ever seen" or "you are amazing" but nobody invested in your product or service, and nobody wanted to have a follow up meeting with you. How do you feel? No good, right? The biggest lesson I learned in 11 years speaking is this one: Teaching and Influencing are two different things. I have rescued teachers and educators from misery because they were excellent presenters (even better than myself) but very poor influencers (they could not get people to take action). For more advanced presenters, this area has the biggest impact in their careers. Experienced presenters already speak with confidence and charisma in front of a crowd and most likely, they have an organized way to deliver their content. What they are looking for is the extra strategy that will help them increase their conversions. There are several influence principles from different fields like neuroscience, physiology, NLP, hypnosis, decision making, social psychology and negotiation that can help the persuasiveness of a message. The key is to know: a) what principle to use b) when to apply this techniques c) the correct dose to use. When you consciously incorporate increments of influence with the presentation delivery, structure and psychology, you likely to move your audience into action increases dramatically. Presentation Marketing: You have mastered the 4 pillars of a persuasion communication:

  1. You are a confident present
  2. You crafted a persuasive presentation fast
  3. You deliver your message with charisma and influence
  4. You know who to apply the latest influence strategies to increase the compliance.

But there is one element missing: the audience!!! For some of our clients, that is not a problem. For example, the Executive already has a captive audience like the employees, team members and shareholders to deliver a message to and she does not need to learn how to market her presentations.

On the other hand, other clients, like the Professional Speaker and the Entrepreneur want to use public speaking and presentations as part of their business model. These clients are always looking to generate new speaking opportunities, such as speaking at someone else's event, webinar and chambers of commerce, as a way to acquire new clients.

Marketing your presentations and finding new groups may or may not be your challenge, but the great news is that there is solutions for that as well.

What Does Our Coaching Program Include? After analyzing the 5 types of clients we serve and the 5 major categories of problems they face, we developed a Coaching Program called:

Presentation Mastery

This coaching program is flexible enough to consider the presenter' skill level, message and industry, but structured enough to help him to achieve his outcomes. Our Presentation Coaching Program includes these modules: Module 1: The Psychology of Presenting In this module you will learn:

  • How to overcome both the FUNDA (fear, uncertainty, nervousness, doubt and anxiety) of speaking in front of groups of people
  • How to eliminate camera shyness while speaking with charisma in front of a camera
  • How to go beyond overcoming the fear of speaking and actually look forward to and enjoy your next presentation
  • How to become a presenter and influencer for life
  • How to master the 8 psychological drivers of the Influencer

Module 2: Presentation Structure In this module you will learn:

  • How to speak impromptu
  • How to really understand your audience
  • How to create persuasive presentations using InfluenceOlogy proprietary formulas
  • How to create a presentation that creates a whole-mind experience
  • How to create unique, relevant and influential content super fast
  • How to quickly organize your ideas into presentations
  • How to create unlimited fresh content
  • How to achieve presentation flexibility: the power to persuasively present in different scenarios: one on one, over the phone, webinars, videoconferencing, live group presentations and video presentations.
  • How to open any presentation powerfully
  • How to engage your audience within the first seconds of your presentation
  • How to select the correct medium to communicate your message
  • How to to develop a compelling and irresistible offer

Module 3: Presentation Delivery In this module you will learn:

  • The mistakes that boring presenters make
  • How to become a charismatic presenter
  • How to dramatically reduce the use of filler words
  • How to use your body language to project confidence
  • How to utilize the key elements of presentation delivery (eye contact, energy level, body language, voice control, etc)
  • How to manage the energy of the room
  • How to engage any audience throughout out your presentation

Module 4: Increments of Influence In this module you will learn:

  • How to create your Signature Story
  • How to find, develop and incorporate your stories into your presentations
  • How to transform your biggest challenges into competitive advantage throughout storytelling
  • How to address resistance and eliminate objections with storytelling
  • The different stories that every professional must learn how to tell
  • How to use incorporate 10 research-based influence principles into your presentations.

Module 5 : Presentation Marketing In this module you will learn:

  • How to develop a sales funnel and revenue model
  • How to incorporate your public speaking and presentations into your current business model
  • How to create your speaker BIO and marketing materials
  • Key ideas to promote and attract attendees to your presentation
  • How to leverage social media and video marketing to get your message out
  • How to transform your presentation into a lead-generation machine

Module 6 : Integration In this module you will:

  • Create presentations using InfluenceOlogy's proprietary presentation formulas
  • Rehearse your new presentation using our preparation strategies
  • Present your final presentation to me (live, webinar or Skype)
  • Get a lot of feedback to keep leaning and improving

How Do We Work Together?

Here is a question that I get asked all the time: "Roberto, how do we work together"? The answer is always: "depends, what do you really want?" The reason my answer is "depends, what do you really want?" because presentation coaching is very unique. As I mentioned before, I have coached clients who were professionally speaking for 7 years before they hired me (and they hired me so I could help them increase their sales conversation) and I also have coached college students to help overcome their phobia of speaking (because they were about to quit college). I can give you an idea of how I work by sharing with you some of the projects I routinely perform with our clients:

  1. Presentation Feedback: I watch your presentation and give you critique
  2. Presentation Development: I help you create a presentation (sales presentation, keynote, seminar, webinar, teleconference call, political speech,video, etc)
  3. Presentation Scripting: We will develop the entire presentation for you (FYI, this is not cheap)
  4. Presentation Intervention: I help you overcome your fear of speaking
  5. Influence Training: I help you make your presentation even more persuasive
  6. Presentation Delivery Training: I help you make you more charismatic
  7. Personal Story Development: I help you create your signature story
  8. Story Database Development: I help you create and organize sales stories for your organization
  9. Offer Development: I help you develop your offer
  10. Content Development: I help you develop a series of presentations (video, webinars, public speaking)
  11. Team Presentation: I help you develop and deliver your group presentation
  12. Marketing Materials: I help you brainstorm and create your marketing materials

As you can see, different people want different things. Some of our coaching clients retain us for one specific project, others decide to work with us as long as we keep adding value to them. It is up to you to decide. How we do our coaching sessions vary as well:

  • Sometimes I go with my clients to their presentations as the "camera man"
  • Sometimes our clients fly to San Diego to work with me
  • Sometimes I fly out to anywhere in the world to work with my clients
  • Sometimes we do our coaching calls via Skype
  • Sometimes we do our coaching calls via webinar
  • It all depends on our clients outcomes and urgency.

My question to you is "How can I help you specifically?"

Email me at support[at] influenceology.com and let's have an exploratory conversation.